Increased market prices for energy and fuels are driven by a number of factors including a depletion of easily accessible petroleum and natural gas deposits, growth of emerging economies, and mounting environmental concerns. Consequently, these increasing energy prices will eventually require a significant restructuring and/or replacement of a major portion of fossil fuels by renewable energy technologies such as biomass-based fuels.
Approximately 67% of the petroleum used in the United States is currently used in transportation. While the transportation sector accounts for less than 30% of total U.S. energy use, it is by far the largest user of petroleum products, since electricity production and industrial processes (the other major energy-using sectors) rely mostly on coal, natural gas, nuclear, or hydroelectric energy. Most of the remaining energy use is residential, which is a mix of all the foregoing forms. Of the petroleum used, over 50% is now imported from outside the U.S. Petroleum imports are of increasing concern because of price escalation and the large proportion of imports coming from potentially unreliable sources. In addition, concerns are growing that “greenhouse gases” released from fossil fuels may contribute to climate changes. For economic, environmental, and political reasons, therefore, it is highly desirable to reduce the amount of petroleum burned, which practically means that an alternative fuel must be provided for the transportation fleet, in addition to changes in the fleet composition.
Much research has been devoted to a long-term future in which the transportation fleet is powered by hydrogen—the “hydrogen economy.” However, this goal has proven elusive and does not appear practical in the foreseeable future. Instead, a more likely path to reducing or replacing petroleum in transportation is the use of biofuels. Biofuels are so named because they are produced from biological sources, primarily plant growth. Petroleum products were also once produced by biological processes, with the plant or animal products from many millions of years ago accumulating in fossil forms of hydrocarbons. Almost all biological energy starts with the conversion of sunlight to carbohydrates through photosynthesis. In essence, the use of petroleum releases the energy of sunlight stored in the past, while biofuel production utilizes energy captured from the sun on a current basis.
In its simplest form, photosynthesis uses energy from the sun to convert carbon dioxide and water from the environment into carbohydrates. It is possible to release energy directly from some forms of these carbohydrates (e.g. burning wood or straw), but for modern transportation such forms are not practical. Instead, a more practical fuel can be produced by processing the plant carbohydrates into liquid forms giving higher energy densities and combustion processes more acceptable to internal combustion engines—in other words, biofuels.
The use of biofuels generally is by no means a new or novel idea. In fact, some of the earliest internal combustion engines ran on biofuels. When Rudolf Diesel developed the diesel engine, the fuel he used was peanut oil. Henry Ford was committed to the use of ethanol in his cars, and one of the best-known early trademarks for fuel stations in the US was “Ethyl.” Both peanut oil and ethanol were, of course, displaced by petroleum-based products including diesel fuel and gasoline as those products became abundant and cheap. Because of the economic, environmental, and political factors mentioned above, however, the advantage of petroleum is now disappearing and biofuels are once again becoming a top candidate fuel for vehicles.
Many analyses have been done of the true economics of biofuel production compared to petroleum-based fuels, and most of these studies show that in the absence of government subsidies current forms of biofuels are somewhat more expensive on an equivalent-energy basis than petroleum fuels. However, the cost curves have been converging and are likely to cross within the next few years with the development of improved biofuel production processes.
Economically, if future carbon credits are included in the analysis, then biofuels may be cheaper than petroleum fuels even today and certainly cheaper in the future. Environmentally, the process of creating and releasing energy from biofuels should be substantially carbon-neutral, since carbon from the atmosphere is stored in the fuel, then released once again when burned. With today's biofuel production, this ideal statement is not true, since petroleum fuels are used in the production of biofuels (primarily through agriculture). Nevertheless, as production processes for biofuels improve it will be possible to achieve much closer to carbon-neutrality and at lower cost than fossil fuels.
Engines for Transportation
The current transportation fleet uses mostly internal combustion engines operating either as compression ignition (diesel) engines burning diesel fuel or spark ignition engines burning gasoline. A much smaller amount of fuel is used in jet or turbine engines burning jet fuel (similar to kerosene). In the U.S., the ratio of gasoline to diesel fuel is about two to one, with 120 billion gallons of gasoline and 60 billion gallons of diesel fuel used annually. About 20 billion gallons of other fuels are used, giving a total of approximately 200 billion gallons used annually in transportation.
Diesel engines are 30 to 40% more efficient than gasoline engines, meaning that thermodynamically diesel engines extract 30 to 40% more usable energy from the input fuel. This is true because diesel engines operate at higher pressures (higher compression) and higher combustion temperatures than gasoline engines. If all gasoline engines were replaced with diesel engines the amount of fuel needed in total would be reduced from 200 billion gallons to approximately 160 billion gallons by this step alone.
This is a practical step to reduce petroleum use which uses currently available technologies, and will therefore likely occur worldwide. The process is already well advanced in Europe and Japan. In Europe, more than 50% of the new passenger fleet is diesel, compared with a much lower percentage in the U.S. In the U.S., passenger car drivers have traditionally avoided diesels for a number of reasons, and some states, notably California, have created regulations which make diesels unattractive, in order to reduce emissions associated with diesel engines, including soot, nitrogen oxides, sulfur and “diesel smell.” In addition, most drivers consider diesels to be noisy, rough, heavy, less powerful, and more expensive than gasoline engines.
To some extent these complaints have been true, but new technology is solving many of these problems. The most prominent new diesel technology is the growing use of common-rail fuel systems, which provide higher pressure and more uniform injection of fuel into the engine. This results in cleaner combustion, more power, less noise, and smoother operation. Ultra-low-sulfur fuels are also being introduced, which will remove most sulfur emissions. Nitrogen oxides will be substantially reduced in new engines in the next few years by improved catalytic converters. Further, as will be discussed below, biodiesel burns cleaner and with lower emissions than even the most advanced petroleum-based diesel fuels, further tilting the balance toward diesel engines.
With these and other developing technologies a very attractive diesel-electric vehicle with excellent driving characteristics (superior to most vehicles today) could replace current propulsion technologies, while providing much higher operating efficiencies. The efficiencies could double the mileage of current gasoline-engine vehicles while not sacrificing power, comfort, acceleration, or drivability.
Even if these changes in the transportation fleet do not take place, diesel fuel will still be required in very large quantities for the foreseeable future. In addition, the production process for biodiesel is generally more efficient than the production process associated with bioethanol or other alcohols, which is the other main alternative biofuel. Based on this analysis, the most desirable fuel for the future is diesel fuel, and emphasis should be placed on biodiesel production.
Current Biofuel Sources
By far the largest volume of biofuel used today is in the form of bioethanol for spark-ignition engines, with a smaller amount in the form of biodiesel for compression-ignition engines. World production of bioethanol and biodiesel is shown in Table 1.
TABLE 1Primary World Production of BioFuels in 2004Biofuel TypeProduction by RegionFeedstockVolumeBioethanolBrazilSugarcane5 billion gallonsUSACorn4 billion gallonsEUSugarbeet1 billion gallonsBiodieselGermanyRapeseed600 million gallonsUSASoybeans50 million gallons
Both bioethanol and biodiesel are produced primarily from plants. The plant material used for ethanol is a form of sugar in Brazil and the EU, and corn in the U.S. For biodiesel, the primary source is oil from rapeseed in Germany or soybeans in the U.S. The reason why these sources are used is that they are well known and already grown, and because the sugar, starch, or oil is relatively easy to extract and process into fuel.
However, in the long term using food crops for fuel is not optimal. Food crops require premium land, abundant water, and large inputs of energy in the form of agricultural machinery and fertilizer. In addition, sugar in Brazil is often grown on land which might otherwise be rainforest, thus further depleting an already diminishing environmental resource. Competition for food inputs will only increase, and in the event of food shortages, fuel for vehicles would become expensive. Moreover, fuel yields of these crops are low enough that unrealistic amounts of land would be needed to significantly or completely replace fossil fuels.